Month: June 2015

If you regularly go to McDonalds, you may change your habit if you watch this video simulating a cheeseburger in stomache acid.Â Gross!!

However, it should be stated in fairness to any company that the same results may occur if you put *any* food into straight hydrocloric acid – I don’t know.Â Since I haven’t done this test with a high quality, home made burger, I cannot say for sure that this is because McDonald’s is nasty – although I wouldn’t be surprised.Â I hope someone has time to run this same test as a follow up using a high quality burger…

This tutorial written over at wikihow.com is an absolutely amazingly clear lesson about how to use i.e. and e.g. correctly.Â It seems as though my school system never taught me about these two bad boys and life was too busy to bother so I always defaulted to ‘eg’.

Turns out I was wrong to do so and probably looked a bit un-edumacated.

So, enjoy their post and remember that it’s never too late to teach an old, mangey, stinky, street dog new tricks.

In order to get your license to succeed, you must first get your license to fail from an accredited school of hard knocks.

I used to look at my seemingly endless streams of failures, false starts, half successes and extrinsic accomplisments as ‘bad things’.Â I considered them all proof that I was unable to succeed and even that perhaps God didn’t see it best for me to succeed.Â And, everything except the ‘bad thing’ part might be true – only time will tell.

One thing I have learned, though, is that 100% of the things learned and the experienced gain from working one’s tail off trying to succeed will be a significant factor in any future success, should it ever appear.Â The pain and suffering of failure, disappointment, rejection, betrayal, or worse is the fire that refines the gold, should the person not quit.

And so I don’t quit.

In fact, there may be only one thing that I can be optimistic about these days and that is this: IÂ know that if I keep my integrity high, work hard, keep my eyes focused on eternity and don’t quit, that there is a sure reward at the finish line.

This doesn’t mean I don’t get attacked daily by the desire to quit, though, because I do.Â There is nothing more than my flesh and mind want to do than quit, curl up in a ball and hide from the world.Â I dream of such a moment.

But I won’t quit.Â I’m pressing on.

Be encouraged out there.Â There isn’t a lot of it out there.Â But know that there is wayne out there (dot com) ðŸ˜‰

Have you ever felt like you are just on the edge of destruction?Â Where all the forces of the world are set to destroy you and no matter how many tears you cry you find yourself backed against a wall awaiting the final swing of the enemies sword to end it all?Â This might be financial, spiritual, physical, psychological, social, or any other category of your life.Â The point is that although you believe deep down that things *should* get better, but you find yourself at the end.

I have.

But today my hope was renewed as I was reading the book of Esther.Â Today God opened my eyes and showed me that sometimes He allows us to get right against the wall before He steps in and does His work on our enemies.Â I say ‘our’ enemies, because if we are friends with God (this is possible through Jesus Christ) then our enemies are also God’s enemies.

If you are struggling as I am in this way, you really need to read the book of Esther.Â I would like to rename the book to something like “The Jew’s 11th Hour Bailout” or “The Miraculous Change of Tides” or ‘From Ok to Horrible to Great.”Â The other scripture that goes really well with this book is Ecclesiastes 7:8 “The end of a thing is better than its begginning” because the actual condition of the Jews (including Esther and Mordecai) was much better than before the nasty episode.

A quick summary of the book goes like this:Â Esther, a Jew (an orphan at that), miraculously ended up queen to Ahasueras (spelling?) and well favoured.Â Haman hated Mordecai, but he was righteous and did good towards the King.Â Haman planned to kill Mordecai and every Jew within the king’s kingdom.Â Not only was he murderous, he was also arrogant.Â He went around bragging about how much the king likes him and how great his job was, etc.Â The king trusted him to do what was best and Haman took that trust and used it to execute his own selfish (and evil) purposes.Â Sounds like a few CEOs and politicians, but I digress…Â But the Lord God Almighty doesn’t let this kind of plan go forever.Â And Esther is an example where God didn’t let it go *at all*.Â As soon as Haman had uttered the speedy instruction to kill all the Jews, twice as fast as that, the Lord had turned it around and terminated the plan.Â Although lots of justice happened, the key point is this and I want you to remember this and I’m going to re-read this blog post myself to remember it:

Haman was hung on the the gallows upon which he intended to hang Mordecai.

Read that again.Â That’s a serious revelation if you get it.

Not only will God protect us from this bad thing that seems to be hopelessly coming upon us, but He has the power to totally *reverse* the wicked plan and expose it.

So if wicked is planned against you, or you are being persecuted unjustly, the God of Justice is able to help.

And let’s not forget our friend Job, too, while we are at it.Â His story is a little different, but very much related.Â He was destroyed, bad things had already happened to him, he was left weeping and angry, but God totally rebuilt what he had and his final position was greater than the one he was in before the fire.

Be encouraged.Â Our tears have not been wasted.Â Our prayers have not bounced back off the ceiling.Â The God that we serve is a Mighty God and will do what He will do and He desires to do a mighty work in our situation.Â Hang in there.Â His timing is not our timing but he will leave us with joy and rejoicing.

Logged into your Ubuntu 14.04 computer and all you see is the desktop background and can’t do anything?Â Thinking that you have to totally wipe everything to fix?Â Think again.Â I found the solution.

After much time and fear that I was going to have to spend time backing up stuff via live boot disk or command line, I thankfully came across this post showing how to do it but the solution was actually found deep in the comments by a chap named Daniel.Â Â Here is Daniels solution and I have added one more tip at the end and added my comments in [comment brackets]:

After a long, long, time, the solution to syncing my Owncloud calendar to Android was bloody easy.Â The reason why I couldn’t get it done is because it seems that google (no surprise) blocks these kind of tools from their app place.Â They like to have things like your daily schedule and whereabouts nicely available for exploiting.

If you don’t like that, until the Ubuntu phone calendar synch is up and running and a calendar is paramount, this solution worked awesome for me.Â If you don’t have an owncloud set up in your own house and the calendar set up, I have some post on this site about that but my friend reported that it’s overly and unecessarily complicated.Â Check it out and compare it against others and do your best.

The second assumption is that you can manually download and install a .apk file on your phone.Â I’m pretty sure that all android phones can do this if you go into the security settings and force it to allow non-play apps to install.Â I’m running Cyanogen mod on a rooted phone so it definitely works…

Assumptions:

owncloud + calendar is up and running (or some other network-sharable calendar)

This post includes a quick how-to tutorial and an entire kit in a .zip file to get you started right.Â To simply watermark your documents, all you need is my .pdf files in the kit and a couple of free apps from the Ubuntu Software Center.Â If you want to change the way I’ve laid it out, I’ve also included the GIMP source file so you can just open it, swap out the stamp you want with what I’ve done and export it to .pdf, followed with Bob being your Uncle.

Install PDF Chain from Ubuntu software centre

(not sure if this is mandatory or not) Install pdftk from software center.Â I am pretty sure that PDF Chain is just a nice cover for this so it might automatically install it when you install PDF Chain.Â If something doesn’t wor correctly after doing #1 above, then install this.

*Note: be careful about your output file name.Â It’s very easy to accidentally over-write your source PDF with the stamped one which you might not want to do.Â I recommend saving to a totally different folder called ‘watermarked’ or ‘stamped’ or something.

I’m admittedly not involved with politics as much as I should be.Â I’m involved in a few things but it’s not occupying much of my time.Â It’s quite rare that something happens in politics that makes me upset, but it’s even less often that something downright embarasses me about living in the region.

Christy Clark, in one fell swoop you have:

a) made me lose my entire support for BC Liberals

b) made me lose 90% of any respect I had for you as a Premier (I’m a reasonable man and left you 10%)

c) made me totally embarassed to even live in Vancouver

Word on the street (and I didn’t verify this number with even a search engine search) was that it was going to cost $150,000.00 of taxpayer money, too.

For the first time *ever* I considered moving to Toronto – and I’m not even joking.Â Or with my wife back to her native country in Asia.

Where else in the *world* would this kind of sick wastage occur without authorization?

Where else in the *world* would countless thousands of bridge users be inconvenienced, forced in extra traffic, and asked to use a different bridge to go home later to their families while a few people stretch and sweat on a bridge?Â Have you heard of the Vancouver Art Gallery?Â The pot smokers find it quite acceptable, you know.Â Are you more enlightened than Marc Emery?

Seriously, you should quit.Â And I mean that.Â It’s time.

If you are given any more time, you are surely going to go down in infamy.Â At least now, your kids will be able to laugh this off (do you have kids?) and it will be a family har-har over Christmas dinner for the next 20 years.Â But what’s next?Â Are you going to close down YVR for a Falun Gong meditation?Â How about parking a big air mattress in front of the BC Ferry terminals and do some Tai Chi stretches on them?Â You would inconvenience fewer people there than shutting down the Burrard Street bridge, I’m guessing.

Seriously, quit.

I’ve quit before.Â One time I was a waiter and I kept dropping plates and making personal jokes about the patrons that they didn’t find funny.Â I knew it wasn’t for me. I quit.Â I moved on.

Don’t ruin what’s left of the BC Liberals.Â There aren’t a lot of other options to choose!

If you don’t, I’m seriously going to run for Premier.Â Not because I want to, but because I *have* to for our future’s sake.

End Rant.

…Oh! Wait! One more.Â Your Twitter comments on the subject reminded me of a few high school girls I know.Â Maybe don’t tweet, either.Â Or have someone Tweet for you.Â You must be able to use taxpayer money to hire someone to do that…